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Rochelle Wilner |
Frank Dimant |
Prof. Stephen Scheinberg |
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Rochelle Wilner |
Frank Dimant |
Prof. Stephen Scheinberg |
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by David Matas
Senior Legal Counsel, B’nai Brith Canada, delegate to the World Conference Against Racism and
Rapporteur for the Jewish Caucus in Durban
The world meetings in Durban, South Africa this past summer were supposed to be meetings against racism. Yet, they turned out to be forums for racism.
There were two overlapping meetings, a non-governmental Forum, August 28 to September 1, 2001 and an inter-governmental World Conference Against Racism, August 31 to September 8, 2001. The meetings became venues for attacks against the Jewish community, a focus for global antisemitism. The concluding documents of both meetings were troubling reflections of this anti-Jewish reality.
Canadian non-governmental organizations were present in Durban in large numbers. Many of those attending were financed by the Government of Canada. A number of non-governmental follow-up meetings to Durban have been held in Canada.
Canadian delegates of the Jewish faith were subjected to a daily diet of antisemitic abuse and harassment, while antisemitic pamphlets such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as well as T-shirts and posters with racist slogans, were openly distributed under the very eyes of the organizers. I have already described the antisemitism endemic at Durban in a previous report. (73)
Many Canadian human rights activists were appalled by what happened at Durban and said so. But, surprisingly, there were many members of the Canadian anti-racist community who said nothing, who today endorse the concluding documents of both meetings and call for implementation and follow-up of the Durban meetings.
Why has this divide in the Canadian human rights community occurred? Why is there anybody in the Canadian anti-racist community that today endorses Durban and its results, despite its appalling atmosphere and consequences?
I do not doubt the good intentions and the commitment to fighting racism of those Canadian anti-racists who today promote the results of Durban. Nevertheless, to my mind they have, all the same, made, to my mind, at least one of twenty-one fundamental mistakes. They have overlooked at least one of twenty-one principles that are basic to the fight against racism. These principles are:
1) The struggle against racism needs solidarity for success. Racism against one is racism against all. Ignoring racism against one group not only undermines the fight against racism by undercutting support and weakening numbers. It also undermines the intellectual rationale for combatting racism. Tolerating racism against some while denouncing racism against others is an intellectually incoherent position, undermining the persuasive force of equality advocacy.
Durban was a mixed bag, a combination of racist and anti-racist sentiments and results. Within the broad range of human rights issues, almost everyone in the human rights field has their own focus, interests and specialization. Durban did not attack all races. It became tempting for those who got the wording they wanted in their own areas of interest and expertise to downplay or overlook inappropriate language and behaviour in human rights area outside of their immediate areas of concern.
2) A document that is part racist is all bad. A document that recites a litany of anti-racist statements and appends a few racist statements must be rejected in its entirety. Otherwise, the acceptance gives legitimacy to the racist statements mixed in with the anti-racist ones.
The dilemma that many anti-racist groups in Durban faced was that the racist was mixed in with the anti-racist component. There was a reluctance to abandon the many advances because of the few steps backward.
Yet, by accepting a few racist sentiments, as the price for generally positive anti-racist documents, the anti-racist movement barters away its soul. Trading off racism for anti-racism is a devil’s bargain. The anti-racist community should have no part of it.
3)There is no hierarchy of rights. Human rights are interdivisible and interdependent.
While at the level of principle, this assertion is widely accepted, in practice, there is a hierarchy of rights. Most of my adult life has been spent fighting for human rights that have been given short shrift: the right to seek and enjoy asylum, (74) the right to be free from incitement to discrimination and hatred, (75) and the duty to bring war criminals and criminals against humanity to justice. (76)
Other rights such as, for example, freedom of expression or freedom of assembly, are widely understood. Though even these rights are far too often violated, there is little or no debate at the level of principle that these rights should be respected.
The right to self determination of peoples is, regrettably, a contested right. This is so despite its pride of place in the international instruments. It is the only human right found in both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights.
Nonetheless, the assertion of the right to self determination of the Jewish people through the existence of the State of Israel generates controversy. One reason that the racism of Durban is relegated to the realm of political dispute is that the right to self determination of the Jewish people through the existence of the State of Israel, has been relegated to the realm of politics rather than given the status it deserves as the assertion of a fundamental human right.
It was not only the Jewish people who suffered at Durban from the devaluation of the right to self determination of peoples. It was also the aboriginal peoples. Not only the Jewish caucus walked out of Durban. The aboriginal caucus also walked out. That caucus issued a statement asking all those sympathetic to the rights of indigenous people to join them. The focus of their concern was the endorsement of those provisions of the World Conference Declaration that denied that the term “indigenous peoples” has any international law rights implications (Article 24). Their statement said:
“It is inconceivable and unacceptable that something of this nature would occur at a place where the rights of peoples were to be discussed and protected.”
4) Self determination of a people serves two purposes. One purpose is to ensure a representative, democratic, participatory framework in which the people can participate. The second is to protect, preserve and develop the people’s identity. (77)
One argument heard at Durban and elsewhere against the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish state is that the Jewish people now have their democratic rights respected in many countries, that they would have their rights respected in a Middle East with no Jewish state, that the existence of a Jewish state is not necessary for the respect of the democratic rights of Jews. Even if one accepts what is, in the current context, the wild notion that the democratic rights of the Jewish people would be accepted throughout a Middle East that had no Jewish state, this argument ignores the cultural preservation purpose of the right to self determination.
One reason for the existence of Israel is cultural. Zionism asserts the right of the Jewish people to preserve its cultural identity. The Holocaust, though it left some Jews alive, completely extinguished the Yiddish shtetl culture in Europe. The revival of Hebrew alone that came with the birth of the State of Israel has sparked Jewish culture and religion in a way that was unimagined before the State’s creation. The creation of the State of Israel after the Holocaust has kept alive the identity of the Jewish people despite the Holocaust.
Globally, the Jewish people are a tiny minority who depend on the existence and flourishing of the State of Israel for the preservation, protection and development of their cultural identity. The end of the State of Israel would be an act of cultural genocide against the Jewish people everywhere.
5) The right to equality cuts across all other rights. Every right must be respected without discrimination.
Again, at the level of principle, this assertion seems platitudinous. It is a principle found in both UN human rights covenants. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights provides, in Article 2 (1):
“Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to respect and to ensure to all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction the rights recognized in the present Covenant, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”
The International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights provides, in Article 2 (2):
“The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to guarantee that the rights enunciated in the present Covenant will be exercised without discrimination of any kind as to race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”
Yet again, here, when it comes to practice, problems emerge. At Durban, the rights of the Jewish people and the rights of aboriginal peoples to self determination were not treated equally with the rights to self determination of other peoples. In practice, the right to self determination of some peoples is accepted; the right to self determination of other peoples is controversial.
6) Collective guilt is a form of racism. An act may be wrongful. However blaming the whole group to which the person belongs for the act is also wrongful. The wrongfulness of the act does not justify allocating responsibility beyond the perpetrator to the group to which the perpetrator belongs.
Accusations are made of human rights violations against individual Israeli state agents. These accusations may or may not be accurate, depending on the facts. However, these allegations are spread beyond individual Israeli government agents themselves to the State of Israel itself, then to those who support its existence, and then to those who are suspected of supporting its existence, that is to say, the global Jewish community.
It is this form of racism that was blatant in the Durban Non-Governmental Forum and concluding declaration. The State of Israel, and not just individual Israelis, was accused of the worst crimes known to humanity — genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, foreign occupation, colonialism, ethnic cleansing and apartheid. The accusation was not just that these crimes happened, but that the commission of these crimes is inherent in the very existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish state. The Jewish people world wide were, in turn, accused of complicity in these crimes because of the actual and perceived support from the Jewish community for the existence of the State of Israel. In my report on Durban, previously cited, I have set out in detail how these accusations against the Jewish community were propagated.
There is all the difference in the world between saying that an act of an agent of the State of Israel is wrong and saying that the existence of the State of Israel is wrong, that the commission of an act is inherent in the existence of the state. Accusations of wrongdoing against an individual alone, though they may be libelous when inaccurate, are not an attack on the whole Jewish people.
Some Israeli policies, such as the Law of Return, are intrinsic to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. Criticisms of those policies amount to criticism of the existence of Israel. Other policies can be criticized without attacking the existence of Israel itself.
Some accusations levelled against Israeli policies, for instance, that these policies amount to state enforced apartheid, are accusations, in substance, against Israel as a Jewish state. They are statements that the existence of Israel as a Jewish state is an international crime. Other criticisms of Israel state policies, such as that security measures have a discriminatory impact against Arab Israelis, are the sorts of criticisms we find in any democratic state and, whether true or not, are at least legitimate subjects of discussion.
There is a difference between criticizing an Israeli policy as unwise and calling that same policy an international crime. That is certainly true of Israeli policy that has allowed some Jewish settlements on the West Bank. Whether or not Israel should allow settlements on the West Bank is a legitimate policy dispute. Labeling state tolerance of those settlements as an international crime becomes an attack on the existence of the State of Israel by criminalizing the whole Israeli state apparatus.
Similarly, there is all the difference in the world between defending the existence of the State of Israel and defending its policies. At Durban, Jewish civil society organizations were ignored or discredited as apologists for the practices and policies of the State of Israel simply because they defended the existence of the State as a Jewish state. Indeed, representatives of Jewish civil society organizations were asked to leave some Durban non-governmental meetings on the basis that they were agents of and apologists for the State of Israel. An assumption that individual Jews or the organized Jewish community are apologists for every act committed by Israeli state agents is itself a form of prejudice against the Jewish community world wide.
7) Victimization appropriation is a form of racism. When one group appropriates or generalizes another’s group’s victimization, the true victims are demeaned. The suffering of the victim group is trivialized.
We are used to appropriation of the good in other groups and know to condemn it. Victim envy is a related but strange phenomenon. It is strange that other groups would like to pretend that they have been as badly treated as the true victims.
Yet, that is what has happened to the Jewish community, and it happened at Durban. Anti-Zionist groups attempted to appropriate the victimization of the Jewish community that gave Israel birth, in order to undercut the rationale for Israel’s existence. Though it did not surface in the final declaration, the draft intergovernmental declaration had the phrase “holocausts/Holocaust” in square brackets, meaning that the use of the word “Holocaust” in the singular with a capital “H” was in dispute. The NGO Forum Declaration and Program of Action did appropriate the word “antisemitism”. The words “anti-Arab racism is another form of antisemitism” and “Arabs as a Semitic people have also suffered from alternative forms of antisemitism” appeared in the final version of the nongovernmental declaration (paragraphs 46 and 79 of the NGO Forum Declaration).
8) Coded racism is as harmful as explicit racism. Explicit racism is overtly offensive. Coded racism is insidious and may be even more effective because it does not arouse immediate opposition. Indeed, coded racism does not even seem like racism to those who do not see through the coding. That was a particular problem with the intergovernmental Durban concluding document.
That document states in paragraph 61: “We recognize the right of refugees to return voluntarily to their homes and properties in dignity and safety, and urge all States to facilitate such return.” Its wording differs from an earlier paragraph which calls for return of refugees to their “countries of origin” (paragraph 53). It also differs from the language in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which says in article 12(4): “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country”.
In the Middle East context, there is all the difference in the world between a right to return to a country of origin, to a person’s own country, which is an international human right, and the right to return to a person’s home and properties, which is not an international human right. The country of origin of Palestinian refugees is British mandate Palestine which no longer exists and has been replaced, for the Palestinians, by the Arab state still in the making within the borders of the old British Mandate Palestine. The “own country” of Palestinian refugees is the same, the Arab state still in the making within the borders of the old British Mandate Palestine. The phrase “homes and properties” which we find instead in the Durban document is a coded reference to the mass influx of Palestinian refugees and their descendants into Israel and the destruction through demographic means of the State of Israel as a Jewish state.
The phrase “homes and properties” looks innocuous. However, those familiar with antisemitism and anti-Zionism will see it for what it is, a coded reference to the destruction of the Jewish state and a denial to the Jewish people of their right to self determination. Coming as it does immediately after two paragraphs that are specifically addressed to Israel and the Palestinians and within the text of an anti-racist document, the paragraph echoes a United Nations General Assembly resolution passed in 1975 and repealed in 1991 that equates Zionism with racism. (78)
9) Racism mutates. The form of racism changes. The vocabulary and stereotypes associated with victimization go through constant updating. But the fact of racism remains. To fight racism, we have to set ourselves against not just its historical patterns, but its contemporary realities.
The anti-racists who identify with Durban will tell you that they oppose antisemitism. But the type of antisemitism they oppose is historical antisemitism, the stereotypes and vilification of the Jews that have largely gone out of fashion in the West — though they are still widespread in the Middle East — or the blatant antisemitism that has become the credo of the lunatic fringe.
Today, the main forms of antisemitism are Holocaust denial and anti-Zionism. Of the two, anti-Zionism is by far the greater threat to the Jewish community, if only because of its greater prevalence. Standing against past forms of antisemitism, but tolerating contemporary forms of antisemitism is not a true anti-racist stance.
10) The struggle against racism is not just a struggle against racist practices. It is also a struggle against incitement to hatred and discrimination.
There are all too many people in the human rights world who feel uneasy about combating incitement to hatred and discrimination, who feel that freedom of expression should be given free rein. They argue that the real damage comes from racist practices, and our attention should be turned to those.
My own view is almost the opposite. While, obviously, I decry racist practices, I think that incitement to hatred has to be taken very seriously indeed. Incitement to hatred, at bottom, is incitement to violence. Killing people for no other reason than that they are Jewish has become an almost daily occurrence in Israel. Suicidal bombers are motivated and reinforced by hate propaganda against the Jewish people of the sort that emanated from Durban.
I have argued elsewhere (79) that waiting for the murders to occur before we react to incitement to hatred is waiting far too long. We must act before the poison of hatred has had the chance to lead to mass killings.
11) An ethnic group can be disadvantaged in one way and advantaged in another. A group does not have to be multi-disadvantaged in order to need the protection of equality principles.
The Jewish community in North America and Western Europe does not meet with the discrimination, let alone the genocide, it once faced. The professions, the golf clubs, the dining clubs, the universities, business and banking are now open to the Jewish community in a way that would have seemed unimaginable sixty years back. The Jewish community in the West is not the harassed, marginalized, impoverished community it once was.
This progress in overcoming historical disadvantage has led to distorted thinking. To some, the Jewish community is not a group in need of equality protection because of the progress it has made.
However, that progress does not change the reality of contemporary antisemitism, everyday incitement to hatred against Jews. In the West, that incitement is marginalized, the domain of a lunatic, neo-Nazi, Holocaust-denying right wing fringe. Even in the West, in some of the countries of Western Europe, that extreme right wing has troubling strength. In the US, where the extreme right is tiny, the culture of violence and the prevalence of weaponry make the extreme right a disproportionate threat.
In some Arab countries, regrettably, antisemitism is more than just the purview of the marginal. It is mainstream, accepted and endorsed by governments.
Being against the right to self determination of the Jewish people is, even in isolation, a form of antisemitism. But the enemies of the State of Israel do not just restrict themselves to this one form of antisemitism. In a desire to latch on to anything that would justify the destruction of Israel, anti-Israel fanatics have seized on and promoted every form of antisemitism. This perpetuation of antisemitism must remind us that, in some respects, the Jewish community is as much disadvantaged today as it has been in the past.
12) It is not just governments that violate human rights. Non-governmental entities can also be the source of human rights violations. The ultimate test of whether human rights are violated is what happens to the victim, not who is the perpetrator. (80)
One of the disturbing and frightening facets of Durban is that the main threat to human rights came not from governments, but from non-governmental organizations whose primary agenda was antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Bolshevik-like, they manipulated and overtook a frail disorganized structure in the Non-Governmental Forum, imposing their agenda of incitement to hatred on a forum structure that required good will and cooperation in order to function.
Anti-racist non-governmental organizations are used to looking to the non-governmental world as their allies and the governments as their opposition. When in Durban, the main racist threat came from their colleagues in the non-governmental community, while anti-racist non-governmental groups were undefended both organizationally and intellectually.
13) Disadvantage does not mean innocence. Minority status does not sanctify. The powerless are not always right.
For many, sympathy runs to the Palestinians over the Israelis because Israeli military power is greater than that of the Palestinians. The conclusion of imbalance can be questioned if one compares the military force of Israel with the military force of those states hostile to Israel. Nonetheless, Palestinians are seen as the underdog in the Palestinian-Israeli dispute and, in some circles, win favour because of that perceived underdog status.
That sympathy is unsophisticated, and not grounded in human rights. Disadvantage is not a license to violate rights. Racism and incitement to hatred are not a legitimate victim’s perspective. The powerful leaders of a powerless group are not entitled to violate the basic human rights of the powerless members of a supposedly powerful group.
In any case, the notion of Palestinians as underdogs was blatantly contradicted by what went on in Durban. It was the Jewish caucus meeting, not the Palestinian, that was invaded and overwhelmed. It was the Jewish caucus press conference, and not the Palestinian, that was raided and shouted down. It was the Jewish caucus meeting place, the Durban Jewish Club, and not the Palestinian meeting place, that was blockaded by a hostile demonstration which prevented a meeting from taking place. It was the Jewish caucus text, and not the Palestinian text, that was voted out from the concluding document in plenary without a chance given for a Jewish caucus representative to speak on it. One would have thought that those at Durban with sympathy for the underdog would have done something to prevent this sort of trampling on the rights of an isolated minority from happening.
14) Nothing excuses racism, neither politics, nor economics nor religion. Racism has no excuse. If you bump into someone inadvertently and the response is a racial slur, the issue ceases to be who was at fault in the collision. The issue becomes instead the racist slur.
The anti-Jewish racism we heard at Durban, and can now read in the concluding documents, came out of Middle East politics. However, it is not just Middle East politics. Many of those who today line up in support of Durban dismiss its racism as Middle East politics. Yet, though politics may have been the cause, it is not a justification. Racism may be explained by context, but, surely, it should not be defended by context.
15) Hear the other side. In Latin, audi alteram partem. Just as it is important that equality guarantees not be violated in respecting other rights, it is crucial that the duty to hear both sides is not violated in respecting the equality guarantee.
Though the Jewish caucus is sometimes criticised for walking out of Durban on the grounds that we should have stayed to discuss our concerns, the reality was that reasoned discussion was impossible. We were constantly shut out and shouted down wherever we turned. The caucus on antisemitism was invaded by hostile elements in mid-session and could not continue in plenary. A press conference the Jewish caucus held was invaded by these same hostile elements and had to stop before reporters could ask their questions. Individual interviews of Jewish caucus members with reporters were harassed by antisemitic elements to the point where the interviews could not take place. Our meeting site, the Durban Jewish club, was the scene of a hostile demonstration that prevented us from meeting there. The closing plenary excised a part of our text denouncing antisemitism, without giving us a chance to speak.
16) An illegitimate process produces illegitimate results. A poisoned tree has poisoned fruit. It is impossible to rally behind the results of any conference where the procedures are unknown or applied inequitably, and the result was manipulated.
At Durban, though some people liked the results, it is hard to find anyone who liked the process. The violation of the rule that both sides should be heard was only one of a myriad of violations of due process. The non-governmental Forum in particular was an organizational shambles. Texts that were supposedly subject to discussion were presented at the last minute, sometimes after the discussion had begun. Voting procedures were never completely written and kept on changing. No one tried to stop the pervasive promotion of antisemitic hatred on the grounds of the Non-Governmental Forum.
17) Don’t shoot the messenger because you do not like the message. Do not blame the media for what they are telling you. The media report events. They do not create events.
One of the constant criticisms of Durban is that the media got things wrong, that there were important other events besides its antisemitism that were not being reported. One human rights organization after another asked the media to shift its focus from what they euphemistically called “the Middle East” to other matters. Much of the support for Durban comes from people who saw Durban differently from the way the media saw it.
One or two reporters can get things wrong. When the whole world media tells you something is happening, it is happening. Denouncing the media in these circumstances becomes an attack on freedom of information.
18) The fight against racism requires public support. The promotion of equality, at the end of the day, can succeed only if the community at large endorses equality. Anti-racism is not a technical specialty that functions effectively in isolation from the rest of the world. The struggle for equality will ultimately win the day only if the whole world buys into it.
Whatever else one can say about Durban, it was a public relations disaster. Tying the fight against racism to Durban means associating a winning principle with a lost cause. Embracing Durban can only harm the fight against racism. The anti-racist community should cut its losses by disassociating itself from Durban.
The media and the public before, during and after Durban have failed to address racism adequately. However, neither Israel nor the Jewish community are responsible for this fault. Blaming Middle East politics or Israel or the Jewish community for this fault does nothing to cure it. It rather scapegoats innocents and diverts attention from real solutions.
19) The human rights struggle must be grounded in reality. Fighting for human rights means bringing truth to power. In order for the anti-racist movement to be credible, it must be truthful to others and truthful to itself.
A Durban that was only anti-racist, that was untainted by the antisemitism, the incitement to hatred, the chaotic organization from which it suffered, would have been a far better support for the anti-racist cause. Wishful thinking about Durban, about the Durban that might have been, should not lead anti-racists into Durban denial, Durban fantasy. Pretending that what did happen did not happen or ignoring what happened at Durban does not change the reality. It just undermines the credibility of the anti-racist movement.
20) The struggle against racism does not require the embrace of every declaration that has some anti-racist sentiment in it. If the Devil quotes the scriptures, that does not mean it becomes necessary to quote the Devil. A declaration of anti-racist principles can stand on its own, without reference to statements that are only partially satisfactory.
It is possible, indeed desirable, to endorse the anti-racist discourse found in the Durban documents without giving a seal of approval to or even mentioning those Durban documents. There is no need for the concluding documents of Durban to be a reference point for the global struggle against racism to continue. The fight for equality is a fight for principle, not the fight for acceptance of a controversial document. Those who are committed to the fight against racism should keep the main goal in mind and not get lost in a diversion.
21) Do not create a platform for racism. The last thing that anti-racist community should want to do is to construct a racist venue.
Durban was a disaster, a racist conference in the name of anti-racism. No one seriously opposed to racism should want another set of conferences like the ones we saw in Durban. The whitewashing of Durban goes hand and glove with an effort to have a Durban follow-up conference five years from the initial conference. However, unless the antiracist community distances itself from what happened at Durban and tries to prevent its reoccurrence, future work against racism will inevitably be corrupted.
Durban was an antisemitic jamboree. Is the anti-racist community going to sign up for yet another antisemitic jamboree five years hence? That is the equality issue the follow-up to Durban poses. One can only hope that the answer will be no. There is too much real work to be done in the fight against antisemitism and racism, and it is hoped that Canadian energies will be firmly set in that direction in the future.
If the Canadian anti-racist community endorses the twenty-one principles set out here, the fracture in the fight against equality will heal. The Canadian equality-promoting coalition can get back on track and join together to fight its common enemy of racism.